Further Light and Knowledge

Rule 109 of the white handbook instructs missionaries ought to conduct service projects.
Rule 110 requires all service projects to be approved by the mission president.
Rule 111 limits the amount of time to be spend on service projects to no more than four hours.

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Love before loyalty, people before the organization, and principle before the tribe.
Main Street Plaza

If you performed service projects on your mission, would you, please, describe them? Who initiated them? Your mission president, a missionary, a member, or somebody else?

I would appreciate any detail you deem interesting.

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Love before loyalty, people before the organization, and principle before the tribe.
Main Street Plaza

I went before this was required. We did things for people we knew once in awhile that, I suppose if they'd been "organized", could have been considered "service projects." But no, we actually weren't supposed to do much in the way of service - converting people was considered our "service" 24/7.

The rule about a certain number of hours of service was instituted a few years after I came home.

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The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less. ~ Arthur Miller

The only service project that I did the entire two years was to help turn the cooblestones in the parking lot of the chapel in downtown West Berlin.

M.P.

P.S. Nice to have you back Hellmut!

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Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~Albert Einstein

History is not history unless it is the truth.

Abraham Lincoln

Thanks, Merry. General conference has upset me. I will never get over my mission, I am afraid.

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Love before loyalty, people before the organization, and principle before the tribe.
Main Street Plaza

This. I *still* have nightmares from time to time. Still. 20 years later.

ETA: I don't really think about it that much, but it gets "triggered" occasionally. I swear I have a kind of PTSD.

Per the OP, I also served before this policy was instituted. I remember thinking how great it was, when I was teaching at the MTC, like *FINALLY* doing something worthwhile. But as I've been saying on the Facething all day long for the past two days, the whole notion of proselytism disqualifies the church, for me, from moral standing. When your purpose is to make people join your tribe, you are functioning at a base ethical level.

We probably did service 5 times. Projects were hard to come by, at least for a dumb 19 to 20-year-old kid like me. We could have used some help. I would have loved to have had 4 hours taken care of each week.

Projects we did do included picking up litter on the beach, painting a guardrail on a bridge, and helping file medical records on the air force base.

Hellmut, I didn't watch conference, but all the talk about it in my community tweaked my PTSD. I'm still recovering, I guess.

Thank you, Cumom and Epstein!

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Love before loyalty, people before the organization, and principle before the tribe.
Main Street Plaza

The service projects were instituted while I was serving between '90 and '92 (stateside). I want to say it was about half way through, or a little bit later. I remember they specifically wanted it to be service in the community at large, and not just helping some members move or stuff like that, which we did anyway; but we couldn't count that kind of service towards our 4 hours. It wasn't something to be done for a specific person or family, but on a larger scale, where we'd be exposed to the community in general, not just a limited number of people.

We were to do 4 hours of service, no more, no less. I specifically remember when this was first instituted that elders were getting railed on (lmao, the missionary slang is coming back to me) for doing more than 4 hours in a given week.

I only remember 2 specific service projects, one was volunteering at the local YMCA, another was working at a local food bank, stocking and delivering food. We would just show up and they'd give us something to do. For the life of me, I can't remember what we did at the YMCA. I just remember going there once a week for 4 hours and it was a nice little break from pros(elytizing).

So why was it a "break" from proselytizing? At that time at least, we weren't supposed to do any kind of proselytizing while doing service. I'm not going to say it was strictly forbidden, but it was emphasized that it was just service for the community, nothing else. I believe that because it was a break, that's why there was the problem of elders doing more than 4 hours of service per week. We were, however, expected to stay in "pross" (proselytizing clothes, i.e. white shirt and tie) while doing service.

As with all other missionary rules, following the service rules varied from mission to mission (from what I heard) and even from area to area within my mission. In some areas the elders didn't wear "pross" while doing service. They would wear their p-day clothes, with or without their badge. (I cringe at remembering myself wearing regular clothes with my badge; fucking weird to me now). For some projects it was a stretch to call it service. Sorry, I don't remember specific examples, I just remember some elders bragging about how their "service" allowed them to do things that you wouldn't really consider community service, and/or skirted the lines of, if not outright breaking, other mission rules. Like being exposed to "gentile" music, tv, or being in proximity and having interaction with hot girls, shit like that.

As far as who initiated the service, I remember at first we were just expected to go out and look for shit to do in the community. I believe they encouraged us to work with our ward mission leader, bishop or other local leaders. Then we'd have to get it approved by a DL or ZL, I can't remember which. Actually (sorry, as I write this shit keeps coming back to me), I was a ZL at the time so I'd have to approve it. I'm pretty sure it was up to my discretion, and if I had a question, I'd just go to the APs. That's how I remember some elders coming up with shit that wasn't really service, trying to pass it off as service. Again, I'm sorry I can't remember specific examples, but we all know how we were on our missions-- we were trying to act as dignified servants of the lord, but shit, we were just regular 19-21+ year olds. We'd try to get away with whatever we could.

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He never said it would be worth it; He only said it would be easy.

Exactly! Do you remember weekly planning on sunday nights, pulling out the blue planner (we actually had franklin planners but I remember the blue ones too)? It would have like 2 appointments and you'd be expected to plan out all your other time. It was incredibly stressful to come up with shit to fill up the time. It was fucking depressing just saying, "Ok, we'll tract for 8 hours on wednesday....and thursday...." Just being able to block out 4 hours every week automatically was such a relief.

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He never said it would be worth it; He only said it would be easy.

We did lots of service projects. A few I remember well: we painted a fence at a kindergarten with the kids, we helped numerous members (and some investigators) plant gardens in the summer, we helped clean a hospital where the church donated all sorts of expensive equipment, we helped put bunk beds together for a local orphanage where the church had donated all sorts of expensive equipment, we cleaned up trash on the local beach, we played basketball with the local youth whenever we could.

In truth, we probably did a lot more service than was necessary. Planting gardens, for example, consisted of going out to the member's dacha, which was usually an all-day affair. We'd have a little picnic and play games before going home. We'd show them how to do tinfoil dinners or make brownies or smores. We had a lot of fun.

We worked really hard the rest of the time, though.

I think we did one during my mission, we painted a member's house. I don't recall why or how it was arranged.

(Japan, in the 80s)

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"You can call me Joe,
Buy me a drink and shake my hand"

I served stateside in the late 90s. Certain of the areas I worked in had established ongoing service projects that we would do for four hours every week--if you were a missionary in that particular area, you did that particular service project every week. These included:
1) Helping babysit kids at an economic crisis center so the parents could have a break. We did two two-hour "supervised chaos" sessions at the shelter every week.
2) Working as teaching assistants at a local elementary school. Again, we would do two two-hour sessions at the school every week; sometimes we'd help tutor the kids or help them read, other times we'd just run errands for the teachers (making copies, laminating teaching materials, etc.).
3) Working as a volunteer at a community hospital--again, two two-hour sessions per week. We'd basically sit in a room with a phone and would respond to calls to wheel patients out of the hospital; run materials from one department to another, etc.

Near the end of my mission, a rule came down from on high about how missionaries were no longer permitted to do any service activities where the missionaries would be with children, so I'd imagine that numbers 1) and 2) above got discontinued out of concern for any missionaries behaving inappropriately with the kids, though neither of those situations involved any time where a missionary was alone with a kid where they could not be observed.

Like other posters, we were always expected to wear our proselytizing outfits while doing service, though proselytizing was not supposed to be the point of it (well, except to zealous missionaries who just couldn't fathom helping someone without expecting a conversion in return). In some areas where there were not established service projects, we'd just arrange things on our own, which generally turned out to be helping someone move, painting a house, etc. We did get reprimanded for spending more than four hours in service activities per week--but as noted above, sometimes it was just nice to fill the time with something other than tracting. That happened one time when we were painting an investigator's house--we spent lots of hours painting in the hopes that they'd take the discussions, and I think they only took one. Sad that we were so disappointed by that.

I remember that we also volunteered with a community center that would host dinners and other community functions and the missionaries would effectively serve as the wait staff. I remember some missionaries having a problem with serving people coffee as part of the function since they were "morally opposed" to drinking coffee. I also remember that particular service being funny because apparently all of the other wait staff were various delinquents who had been forced to do the service as part of their discipline, so the patrons were always surprised how polite the missionaries were since they were used to being waited on by the delinquents.

Also, in my mission and many other missions, missionaries teach regular weekly English conversation classes which are considered service. These are largely meant to allow for meaningful discussions to arise outside of class where you convince the students to take the discussions (we got the bulk of our discussions through this method), but we truly did put valuable time into preparing our lessons and tried to offer a substantial service to the students who attended. They were for the most part very interested, so I feel good about the service I offered. (Although there were a high number of young girls more interested in spending time with Americans than learning English, but even they saw how English could help and learned a little).